Sixty years later, however, the religious establishment still generally shares the opinion of the federal government that mescaline, psilocybin, and their psychedelic sisters should remain entirely off-limits. Throughout history the mystics have been persecuted, and sometimes executed, for a reason. “Nothing could be more alarming to the ecclesiastical hierarchy,” the philosopher Alan Watts once observed, “than a popular outbreak of mysticism, for this might well amount to setting up a democracy in the kingdom of heaven.”32
